


Origin

by SweetPollyOliver



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Ableism, Canon Disabled Character, Eugenics, Gen, Jack's childhood, Meltdown, institutionalisation, self injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 09:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4661142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetPollyOliver/pseuds/SweetPollyOliver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack was not the happy baby his parents had dreamed of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origin

Jack was not the happy baby his parents had dreamed of.

He was hard to please and when displeased he was impossible to calm. He once screamed so long and so hard that his mother thought that he must have meningitis or some other life threatening illness and if she didn’t get him to a doctor he’d die before the night was out.

The middle aged pediatrician she brought him to checked him over carefully and performed every test he could think of, but in the end pronounced him perfect and said that there was not a thing wrong with him.

A statement he would retract once Jack’s mother burst into tears and talked about a child that didn’t want to be held or kissed or dressed or washed, a child that didn’t play with his toys except to line them up by size and colour and shape and would shriek if someone tried to move them to play games with him. A child who didn’t smile even at eighteen months and didn’t seek out human faces and twisted away from eye contact. A child who still crawled and didn’t show any sign of walking any time soon. Who thrashed around and hit his head against the floor with worrying violence and then kicked and bit and clawed when his parents tried to stop him.

Two years later, when the magic wand that first pediatrician had sworn did not exist had finally been found, Jack’s parents realised with a sinking dread that they’d done nothing but turn the child they’d jokingly called ‘the little dictator’ into a child with the highest recorded IQ his preschool had ever known of who nonetheless still wore diapers and got so angry he thrashed against floors banging his head while white with rage and hit and bit and scratched a number of the children and adults who tried to interact with him in a series of escalating incidents that ended with Jack’s mother in another doctor’s office tearfully talking about her son.

He was admitted the next day.


End file.
